Managing crew payroll in aviation means navigating a range of complex compensation rules, countless edge cases, and institutional knowledge. Icelandair partnered with Dreamix to automate their per diem crew payroll process, reduce manual labor, and reduce the potential for errors. We helped validate the idea with a demo, then went on to fully automate a process that had previously required hours of manual work each week while cutting errors to near zero.
The Story of our Partner
Our partner, Icelandair, is Iceland’s flag carrier and a leader in the competitive transatlantic aviation market. With a fleet of 55 aircraft and transporting over 5 million passengers annually, the Iceland-based carrier has built its business model around Iceland's unique geographical position as a natural midpoint between North America and Europe.
With almost 4000 employees, the airline has become synonymous with accessible transatlantic travel. Icelandair is recognized as one of Europe's most punctual airlines during peak travel seasons - a reflection of their operational efficiency. With a focus on continuous innovation, Icelandair continues to modernize its fleet and expand its network of destinations across both continents.
The Challenge
Icelandair's per diem crew payroll process had grown complex over time - an elaborate set of rules with a wide range of edge cases and nuances. While per diem is one component of crew payroll, it is arguably the most intricate — a dense intersection of scheduling, international operations, and contractual rules that had historically demanded deep institutional knowledge to manage. They were using a legacy system that was providing some support, but ultimately, users had to fill the gaps manually, carefully working through payroll outputs step by step. It worked, but it was time-consuming and left room for error. They saw an opportunity to modernize - to take the deep institutional knowledge baked into the process and encode it properly into a system that could run it reliably and automatically.
The Solution
We started by spending the first week on discovery, scoping, and relationship-building. By the end of that week, we had a working demo with a basic UI ready to present, setting a pace and standard of communication that defined the rest of the project.
We embedded into one of Icelandair's product teams from the start, working iteratively with business users and implementing their feedback into the solution. Rather than operating as an external supplier, we were collaborative from day one, proposing ideas, conducting discovery, and writing production code in parallel. Icelandair's business users were central to the process. Because the payroll logic was intricate and deeply understood by the people who worked with it daily, building a close working relationship with them was essential.
The core technical challenge was translating intricate business logic into code accurately and completely. The compensation rules were elaborate, and the edge cases were numerous. We tackled this systematically, building the core logic first and then working through each edge case in iterative cycles with rigorous testing after every pass.
Ultimately, we delivered a fully automated end-to-end solution that the aviation leader could rely on completely.
The Results
The solution
- saved 1+ day of manual work per week,
- delivered a clean and well-documented UI,
- provided well-documented business rules and context,
- reduced data errors to near zero,
- and enabled Icelandair to sunset a legacy system, contributing to a broader modernization their technology stack.
But the broader outcome was the partnership itself. The pilot validated the platform to build on, and our team is now contributing to architecture decisions and long-term technology planning.
